RKNet Blog... Thing

Traipsing about my collection of RSS links, as I am oft wont to do, I discovered one labeled Blackr. Despite the obvious Web 2.0 name, it struck me as curious and I proceeded.

Blackr is described as a way to view Flickr content without all the noise of navigation, comments, and various whatnots. There weren’t any examples provided, but the general concept was sound.

I was presented with four bookmarklet options: black background, black background with a white border, white background, and white background with a black border. I chose the bookmarklet for viewing pictures with a black background and a white border.

As a test, I hopped over to Gatochy’s photo stream, a personal favorite Flickr gallery. Picking an enchanting photo of Anna May Wong, I clicked the bookmarklet with my breath held for impending browser doom. (As an Opera user, I tend to be a little skeptical of neat new add-ons, as most of them are designed with Firefox in mind.)

The results?

Wow! The photo really stands out with the crisp border and the dark background, like putting diamonds on black velvet. I imagine that this tool would be most useful for people who have to find photos for a specific purpose and need a lightbox approach to viewing Flickr images. People who really prefer a minimalist approach to image searching, and people who like fancy web toys might also find a lot of use for this bookmarklet.

It’s also got keyboard shortcuts available to change the background/border, and to turn the effect off so you can continue on your Flickr-y way. (The 1,2,3,4 options listed on the Blackr site don’t work for me, as they’re already assigned as Opera shortcuts.)

All in all, a really neat bookmarklet tool for Flickr fanatics! I give it a 4 out of 5.

I don’t ordinarly gush over gadgets, but this keyboard - The Optimus Maximus - has me absolutely drooling. Engadget has a coulple sneak peeks at this techno-candy-ultra-tool.

This could be the most awesome thing art.lebdev has ever done. Which is saying a lot because if you hit the site, you’ll immediately note (besides the serious Optimus promo) at least a few nifty things.

What is the Optimus? Well, I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.

In all seriousness, it’s a fully programmable LCD keyboard. What this means is that it can be customized perfectly for gaming shortcut key layouts, photo editing shortcut key layouts, various language layouts, etc etc. Not only can you assign keys to specific tasks, but you can have those keys display custom images so you don’t forget what exactly those keys are for.

As delightful as that sounds for multi-discipline computer users, the Optimus has been delayed time and time again. The price point may be a bit off-putting for a lot of people, also. $462.27 US dollars will snag you one of these gorgeous technical delights with ONE programmable key. $1564.37 US dollars will get you all 113 keys of LCD glory.

As of this post, it’s available for pre-order and is supposedly going to ship in February 2008. Be patient, gentle readers! Don’t smash that piggy yet (unless you can afford to pre-order)! Save your pennies, nickels, dimes, wrinkled dollar bills.

Despite my lust for this beauty, I’m still skeptical enough to want to wait for some solid reviews before I commit myself to starvation to get one.